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Where and when did you hear about geocaching the first time?


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First time I heard about geocaching was in 2003 on TV. I remember thinking to myself "Why would somebody want to find an old box under some bushes?". Later on I discovered the deeper meaning of geocaching and bought the Garmin Colorado I still use. Soon I was hooked :-)

 

Where and when did you hear about geocaching the first time?

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I use to do GPS seminars were I use to workjng before geocaching was around. they just evolved into geoaching seminars. The people that attended then were amazed that I had found almost 50 :) caches and were more amazed that there was a cacher only20 miles away "Forman" that had found over 100 caches. :) This was back in the day that lamp post caches were cool. B)

Edited by JohnnyVegas
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We were out offroading in Ocotillo Wells, and when we stopped for a break, a friend of mine said lets go find this Geocache. I was like WHAT? We happened to be about 200ft away so we walked over and found it. We have been caching ever since. We already had a few gps units for marking trails so we were ready to go. Still having a blast caching.

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Several buddies of mine in the military (years ago) told me how they would hide stuff for the next unit....send the coordinates and they would find care packages with trade items and extra kool aide. I always thought it was neat and when I sent care packages I'd always send extra for them to use.

 

A few years ago I heard that the satellites were for civilian use and the games had begun.....however I didn't have a gps unit and honestly didn't think about until my brother found one a few months ago. He took me and I downloaded the Iphone app on the spot and I am a total addict! I found my very first one on 10/16/10 and am on number 29.

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I found geocaching on the worst day of my life, and geocaching saved my life that day.

 

Read how I and others found geocaching in the introduction of the book The Joy of Geocaching: How to Find Health, Happiness and Creative Energy Through a Worldwide Treasure Hunt

FYI, I could not find a link to the introduction on the link you provided.

I don't know what to tell you - maybe your pop-up blocker blocked it.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Geocaching-Happi...ader_1884956998 works for me. It opens a 'Look Inside' window that lets you get a free look at the book's content. Look for page xi in the Table of Contents section.

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I found geocaching on the worst day of my life, and geocaching saved my life that day.

 

Read how I and others found geocaching in the introduction of the book The Joy of Geocaching: How to Find Health, Happiness and Creative Energy Through a Worldwide Treasure Hunt

Great story, glad you didn't take the boat out. I believe things happen for a reason and thats why the gps arrived in the mail on that day. One of these days we will be out that way to do some caching.

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My wife read an article about letterboxing and geocaching in a teaching magazine in 2006. We didn't have a GPS, but the wife had a stamp kit with letters and numbers. There are 5 members of my family and our last name begins with M. So we grabbed a M and a 5 stamp and hunted down some letterboxes that day. Geocaching seemed faster paced and more interactive, and it is, so some family got together and bought me a GPS for Christmas of 2006. Found my 1st cache that day. I did both for a while, but I hated making stamps for hides, and lost interest in letterboxing.

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I found geocaching on the worst day of my life, and geocaching saved my life that day.

 

Read how I and others found geocaching in the introduction of the book The Joy of Geocaching: How to Find Health, Happiness and Creative Energy Through a Worldwide Treasure Hunt

 

Just bought the Kindle version :unsure:

 

I don't remember exactly when I first heard about geocaching. A geocacher in a forum I frequented pointed to an article about it. Micros were the new thing. I thought it looked interesting and figured I'd look more into it. Then I forgot all about it.

 

Every now and then, I'd remember the article, but couldn't remember anything about the name of the game. I'd think I need to look it up the next time I'm online, but then forget about it the next time I'm at a computer. Then in February 2009, I came across a post on letterboxing, and from there, to geocaching. Found a Magelan Explorer 100. DNFed my first cache, but founjd my second. Then my third was a multi. By then, I was hooked. Attended my first event in April and met some new friends.

 

Now I've been caching for 21 months and am at 499 finds. Need to decide what I'm going to do for #500. :D

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I heard about it in another forum I frequent. I checked it out last year, but I didn't have a GPS unit. We got a TOM TOM for Christmas, and thought that would work for geocaching, but, really wasn't what we needed. This september I got a Garmin eTrex for 5 bucks at a yard sale and started caching. Eventually I would like to upgrade my GPS, but, my chap old eTrex works for now.

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New Years Day this year my friend asked if we wanted to do something, I was like sure, what should we do and she said, ummmm wanna go geocaching? I said sure since I had nothing better in mind and had to look it up before I left. :unsure: I totally didn't get it, but went out anyway and my girls and I were instantly hooked :D I went out with her a few more times and even borrowed her gps and then bought my Delorme pn 40 and have been enjoying it for these last 10 months and hope to for many more years :(

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My brother-in-law from Maine and his son visited us. The son was into geocaching and asked if we would help him out while he found a few caches. In 6 caches he took us to interesting local sites we had never seen before; and we went from "that's really stupid" to "wow! This is fun."

 

Good friends of ours had a 60CS that they just started to use for hiking, and I borrowed it to help decide what kind to get. When I returned our friend's GPS, they said, "Why don't we go geocaching?" It turns out that the caching function on their GPS planted the idea in their minds as well. Five leisurely years later, both teams passed 2,000 together last Sunday.

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My Mom actually told me about it in 2001, however I never got a GPS to check it out. Then recently a friend of mine mentioned it on facebook, I was like..."oh yeah, I wanted to do that, let me check out the website" I saw the iphone app advertised on the page and it was all over. I recently took my Mom on her first cache, almost 10 years after she suggested we do it.

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Was bored one day after entering a few bills into wheresgeorge and decided to explore their forums. People were talking about what to do with bills that had been in these strange things called geocaches. I picked up enough to figure out that that it included gps and outside, sounded like a great combination to me. Found the website and made an account that day. Bought a yellow garmin a day or two later and found my first geocache the next weekend (a twelve point multi). It hooked me, then I began the process of getting family and friends involved. BTW, I quit entering bills into wheresgeorge soon afterwards, it was just too slow paced and boring.

Edited by Laserman
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My wife heard about caching from a friend and thought it would be a fun family activity. She gave a a Magellan SporTrak for Christmas 2003 and we found our first caches the next day. Mostly I find the caches now, but my Son still goes with me pretty often. Very cool since he is now about to turn 21 and we have been sharing this game for almost seven years. :unsure: My wife still goes from time to time but my Daughter isn't into it much.

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Back around May 2000 I was lost somewhere in the NW united states. I wandered for days eating leaves and berries to survive. Just when I was about to give up, I stumbled on a curious container buried in the ground. I opened it up and it had a bunch of stuff in there. Some sort of logbook with no writing in it. Some of the pages made good toilet paper by the way. There was a whole can of beans in there that was a lifesaver. I was able to make a compass out of some of the other items and found my way into Portland. I later found out the bucket was a geostash.*

 

 

*This may or may not be true!

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Just surfing the web, and joined after stumbling on the 2nd reference to Geocaching.com in 3 or 4 months. And I remember them both. The first one was at Drive-ins.com, a website that has pages for every open or closed drive-in movie theatre in the US. Some guy posted to the forum for a closed drive-in theatres page that he hid a Geocache at the site of it, and posted a link to his cache page, which I definitely remember checking out. Didn't think much of it.

 

Then in August 2003, probably a week before I joined, I was surfing epodunk.com, a website full of useless statistical information on municipalities. They have a link on every page "Find geocaches in this municipality". I figued, hey, this is the 2nd time I've heard of this crap, I should check it out. :unsure:

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I read about geocaching in a magazine shortly after getting married in 2001, and thought it sounded like the best idea ever! Then I looked up GPSr prices and thought "How stupid, a game for rich people." This senario repeated itself several times, until May of 2006 when we went on our annual camping trip and our friends said "Hey, let's go geocaching." They had an inexpensive yellow e-trex they'd gotten for $100 (which still sounded like a lot to us). Once I had actually DONE geocaching (we found 2 that weekend), there was no stopping me! My poor husband had to shell out $150 for an etrex legend HCx that I found on e-bay. Bought our maps on e-bay too. Absolutely the best investment we ever made!

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Three weeks ago I was out at a local park hiking with my 5 yr old son, MonkeyHead. As we were hiking along an older man with his two grandsons came up behind us. He then welled out, "Hey! Do you want to see something neat?" I said sure but was a little leary but I figured with three kids around there was nothing to fear. I said sure 5hen watched as he crashes Into the brush off the trail. He came to an old stump. Stuck his hand in and pulled out a drinking container. He then explained geo caching and I loggws It as my first find. I use my HTC EVO to hunt for caches and have fairly addicted ever since.

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We as a family always go to find places to hike. One time we were hiking in a remote area and kind of wanted to farther but really had no way to know where we were at. So when we got back from our trip I decided to look up handheld GPSr's. As I was looking at the user reviews I kept seeing people say that this was good for geocaching or not good for geocaching. So I did what any interested person would do and googled geocaching. I found this site and figured out how to put a gps on my blackberry and found my first cache that was within 5 minutes of my work. Now the whole family is involved and it really enhances our hiking. Bought a PN-40 and have not looked back.

Edited by Team_Searchgeo
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I'm not sure when I first heard about geocaching but I suspect that it was from reading a couple of the outdoor related groups (rec.backpacking was one of them) and hearing about it, perhaps from a crosspost from the sat-nav usenet group where Dave Ulmer first posted the coordinates to the original stash. I though it sounded interesting but couldn't justify buying a GPS just to find tupperware in the woods.

 

Then in Jan. 2007 my wife was looking at some web site (completely unrelated to geocaching) and followed a link to someones personal page where he listed geocaching as one of his interests. She mentioned it to me and as I had a basic idea of what entailed I told here that we'd need a GPS to do it. She said, "we'll you've been thinking about getting one for kayaking and your birthday is coming up..." so I ordered a Garmin GPSMap 76Cx and a couple of days after it arrived went out and found my first cache. I think my wife has only gone geocaching with me a handful of times since and that's usually while traveling on vacation.

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I had heard it mentioned here and there but never really paid enough attention to find out what it was all about. Then about 6 weeks ago my grandson and I were helping one of the boys in his scout troop with his Eagle project and Nick found a "piece of trash" that turned out to be a micro cache. He signed the log and put it back, then when we got home we created an account so he could log the find on the website. When he saw that there more close by he wanted to go try another and we haven't stopped since. We did have to slow down a bit, they are getting farther away and fuel is turning into an issue.

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I heard about it somewhere years ago but never gave it much thought till March of this year I was at a park where I grew up visiting my parents. I was standing around and 3 young kids asked me "if I was looking for the treasure". I didnt know what they meant and later thought about (geocaching) and figured thats what they were doing. Later on the conversation came up with my parents (mugglers at the time) and they said they saw a "very sneaky" person hiding a small tube. Thinking it was drugs they called the police lol....fair enough though. Well we talked and I am now a active geocacher with a great GPS, and they geocache without one trying to find easy-to-find ones in their spare time.

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I heard about it years ago and dismissed it. I didn't have the equipment or ability to travel to those far away caches. So last spring before dinner I was looking at the apps my phone suggested to me and there was the free app. My friend and I test drove it and then bought the full app which was so much better. Then that weekend i ordered the gps and off I went. Still an area with low cache saturation but I still have fun.

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I can't really remember anymore. Must have been somewhere in 2006. I do know in 2007, end of march-ish, i saw a car driving by with a geocaching bumper sticker on it. Having come across this geocaching before, i had a good look at gc.com and though it would be nice having a goal to go outside. So we got ourselves a cute little yellow garmin thingy and gave it a try on 1 april 2007. I enjoyed it, Mrs. Terratin wasn't that convinced, so didn't go 'caching' all that often. It took until we moved to norway end 2008, when we both started to really enjoy caching.

 

Mr. Terratin

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it was last thanksgiving and as our family was sitting around just talking after the meal, my uncle mentioned that he had heard some people talking about geocaching. it sounded cool, so when we got back home i looked it up. i saw that there was about 10 in my town. i have a garmin 260 nuvi and went out and tried to get some. my (then 4) son and i went and grabbed 5 or so with this one. i was hooked!! my son loves the ones with swag, of course! then last christmas my uncle was nice enough to give us a garmin etrex and off we went! now, my uncle, tlcsignman, and us have a nice little contest between us. so far we've been able to stay ahead of him! we are coming up on our 1 year anniversery and i am planning on putting out something special for it. i wish that we had heard of this a long time ago!

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For me, it was a friend over the internet asking "Have you tried this thing called Geocaching yet?" about two months ago. I was like "Nooooo? what is it?" so he linbked me here and gave me a basic idea.. I was floored that there was 4 in walking distance of my apartment, which I found with the helps of the description and google-maps, no GPS yet.. Was hooked after finding and logging the first of them.. Two months later, I've only 45 caches under my belt, and have now planted 3, but both numbers I hope to grow.. :)

 

Jeddarfelix

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read a news story about how the police had found a bomb under a tree and blew it up.

 

Turns out it was actually a "geocache" someone had hidden there, so they put the pieces back together and put it back along with some plastic police badges and other knicknacks from the police.

 

I bought a gps and started geocaching within a few days of reading that.

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